Tag Archives: Dorothea Tanning

Tate Modern presents a major exhibition of the work of American artist Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012). The exhibition is the first large-scale exhibition of her work for 25 years and the first ever to span Tanning’s seven-decade career. The exhibition brings together around 100 works from around the world and includes over a third of which are shown in the UK for the first time. Tanning worked in a range of media from paintings, drawings, stuffed textile sculptures and installations.

Dorothea Tanning was born in 1910 in the small town of Galesburg, Illinois and was fascinated by Gothic and Romantic literature. In the 1930s, she decided to move to Chicago then New York to pursue her artist career. She first encountered surrealism in New York in the 1930s and was instantly attracted to exploring the subconscious in her work. Tanning met German painter Max Ernst in 1942 and they married in 1946.

Tanning began to plumb her own subconscious depths with early works that takes ordinary domestic scenes and introduces gothic scenes that are full of strange imagery. Works from this period such as Children’s Games 1942 and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik 1943 are full of suppressed desires and burgeoning sexuality where open doors represent portals to other places.

Tanning applied these types of symbolism to self-portrait Birthday 1942 which she believed marked her ‘birth’ as a surrealist.

Doors and domestic settings became common motifs in the early part of her career with works like La Truite au bleu (Poached Trout), Some Roses and Their Phantoms and Portrait de famille (Family Portrait).

Tanning held a life-long passion for dance, music and performance and produced set and costume designs for ballets by George Balanchine and John Cranko in the late 1940-50s. These are shown with a series of dynamic figurative paintings such as Tango Lives 1977 that explore movement and sensuality.

In the mid-1960s, Tanning used her Singer sewing machine to make a highly original ‘family’ of soft sculptures that are a main focus of the exhibition. These hand-crafted sculptures are often like body parts that become contorted and intertwined objects. Works like Étreinte 1969 and Nue Couchée 1969-70 illustrate these transformations as does the remarkable room-sized installation Chambre 202, Hôtel du Pavot 1970-3.

After the death of Ernst in 1976, Tanning returned to New York and experimented with her soft sculptures that became objects that straddle the line between playful and sinister. Her later paintings followed this idea of transformation where bodies and nature merge in Poppies 1987 and On Avalon 1987.

This fascinating exhibition takes viewers into the strange and wonderful world of Dorothea Tanning. Her style is similar to Salvador Dali but with a Gothic twist that creates worlds full of symbolism and unconscious desires. Tanning is not widely known in the UK and this exhibition offers the viewer to explore her extraordinary career. In many respects, her strange worlds are oddly familiar which suggests she was perhaps ahead of her time and something of a pioneer.

London Visitors is the official blog for the Visiting London Guide .com website. The website was developed to bring practical advice and latest up to date news and reviews of events in London.
Since our launch in January 2014, we have attracted thousands of readers each month, the site is constantly updated.
We have sections on Museums and Art Galleries, Transport, Food and Drink, Places to Stay, Security, Music, Sport, Books and many more.
There are also hundreds of links to interesting articles on our blog.
To find out more visit the website here

The Tate organisation have announced highlights of its 2019 exhibitions for their galleries in London. In January 2019, Tate Modern will open with Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory, showing how this innovative and much-loved French painter captured fleeting moments in time with his beautifully coloured landscapes and intimate domestic scenes. This will be followed by a survey of Franz West’s irreverent and playful sculptures, collages and installations in an exhibition specially designed by his friend and fellow artist Sarah Lucas. Tate Modern will also stage the first retrospective of Dorothea Tanning since her death in 2012 at the age of 101, exploring how her dreamlike paintings and eerie soft sculptures challenged ideas about the body and identity over a career spanning seven decades.

Tate Britain’s landmark show The EY Exhibition: Van Gogh and Britain will run alongside a retrospective of acclaimed photographer Don McCullin, featuring his powerful images of conflict in Vietnam, Northern Ireland and Syria as well as scenes of urban life and rural landscape in Britain.

The season will also see new contemporary works unveiled with the annual Tate Britain Commission for the Duveen Galleries and the third BMW Tate Live Exhibition in the Tanks at Tate Modern.

In summer 2019 Tate’s programme brings together a wide variety of art forms, from stage and costume designs to immersive and interactive installations.

Tate Britain will showcase the vibrant abstract paintings of Frank Bowling in his first UK museum retrospective, covering the entirety of his long and distinguished career.

Tate Modern will open two survey shows, both focusing on artists who have pushed the boundaries of art, worked across multiple disciplines and staged their work in innovative ways. The UK’s largest ever Natalia Goncharova exhibition will highlight her role as a leader of the Russian avant-garde and a trailblazing figure in painting and design. Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, renowned for his captivating installations like The weather project in 2003 and for his social and environmental projects like Little Sun, will return to Tate Modern for a large-scale exhibition and an outdoor artwork in July 2019.

The autumn sees a striking pairing of historic and contemporary artists at Tate Britain. The gallery’s first William Blake exhibition for a generation will take a bold new look at this radical and ambitious artist, who worked at a time of war, revolution and oppression. It will coincide with a major show of Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey’s explorations of pop culture and the digital world.
Technological innovation will also be a key theme in Tate Modern’s spectacular Nam June Paik retrospective, revealing the Korean artist’s pivotal role in the birth of video and TV art around the world. The annual Hyundai Commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall will also be unveiled in the autumn.

London Visitors is the official blog for the Visiting London Guide .com website. The website was developed to bring practical advice and latest up to date news and reviews of events in London.
Since our launch in January 2014, we have attracted thousands of readers each month, the site is constantly updated.
We have sections on Museums and Art Galleries, Transport, Food and Drink, Places to Stay, Security, Music, Sport, Books and many more.
There are also hundreds of links to interesting articles on our blog.
To find out more visit the website here